boycott-riaa.com - Article: "Trusted Computing" on the rise.

"Trusted Computing" on the rise.

Posted by Alexander Wehr on March 20, 2005 at 3:38 PM (printer friendly)

"If you�ve recently bought an IBM ThinkVantage computer, or a Dell Optiplex, or one of a whole range of laptops from Toshiba, HP/Compaq or Samsung then you may have got more for your money than you realised.

Because inside your shiny new computer is an extra chip called the trusted platform module, or TPM, that can be used to provide a whole range of hardware-based security features.

Eventually the TPM will be built into the main processor itself, and if the trusted computing group has its way then you�ll find one in every piece of hardware you own, from mobile phones to TV set top boxes to children�s toys."

"However there is a downside to the increased security from viruses, spyware and data theft that this will provide. Because the trusted computing base is also used to make digital rights management systems more secure, and this in turn will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them."

source

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I'd like to add something to this..

such devices could be used to require that every file have a digital "ID" before it can even be accessed. Of course this ID would only be given out to people who don't develop competing software, and could prevent you from making or accessing non-drm'ed copies from your own music/movie collections, and could also be used to blanket ban entire file formats.

I think it's absolutely necessary that people write to congress and detail the immense potential for abuse of this technology, because even though they claim they will give you a "choice" to turn it off.. i can GUARANTEE you that most commercial software installers will refuse to install unless you turn it on.

User Comments (These do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of this site)


gdZiemann	Date: March 20, 2005 @ 8:02 PM Or just not buy one.

wet1	Date: March 20, 2005 @ 8:25 PM I doubt the choice of whether to turn it on will be left to the user. I would suspect they will put in the install program the turn on of such without user choice and somewhere in the EULA will be the agreement that you as the user consent to such or prehaps worded more to the effect that you permit the software to make any necessary changes in order to install it. That being one of conditions for operation. Whether to buy one or not won't be left to the consumer in the end. If these first companies coming out have it in them then making all chips contain such won't be far behind. I would suspect that soon you won't be able to buy a cpu, no matter the maker that doesn't contain one and it will be a small thing to be in the active mode from the start once all contain these chips.

awehr	Date: March 20, 2005 @ 9:38 PM ok.... here is a long post on the slimeyness of microsoft trying to slip this crap into their systems and essentially "dupe" people into buying DRM by mistake. Basically, it's talking about how MS and other pcs manufacturers were told by hollywood they'd be locked out of the home entertainment market unless they instituted SSSCA style fritz chips, so now theyre trying to cripple their own systems and slip them to the public before they realize how they've been ripped. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/drm/trans/drm-2-28-p2.htm "Lucky Green: Hello everybody. I would like today to focus on one aspect of digital rights management and it's bigger and somewhat meaner brother trusted computing. One of the subjects of my talk here is whom do you trust and why should you trust entities that perhaps may not trust you. Let me tell you a story. In the fall of 2000, I worked at the time for a fairly sizable vendor of securities products used throughout the industry and received an invitation from this new association that I'd never heard of called The Trusted Computing Association. It sounded really good. What this invitation said is that, hey we would like you to join us; we've been founded some of the largest players in the computer industry, and what we would like to offer you is secure boot. Now secure boot, as I understood it at the time, would enable my applications that are running on top of an operating system to not just know what operating system they are running on, but also what is running underneath the operating system; for example, has my hardware been compromised given the applications that we did, this seemed quite important. I attended some of the formative meetings, and at one meeting, one of the principles, the founding principles, of this Trusted Computing Association, TCPA, after we were discussing secure boot said � through the middle of the presentation seemingly prompted by nothing-one important thing you need to remember is that they were not building a DRM system-why was he talking about a DRM system when we were here to talk about secure boot. I let it go for a moment, but a few minutes later, he again said, "It's important to prevent the public from thinking that we are building a DRM system." After two or three such remarks, I started to wonder what is going on here; what are these people really up to. During a break, I took aside one of the other founding members of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, in fact, a fellow who works for a well known, large vendor of operating systems and office productivity software, and asked him, "So fill me in; what's going on here? Why are we here today?" And he told me, "Listen, it's very simple; our operating system platform, on a general peer purpose PC, currently does not have server content available, such as for example high quality streaming video, that our customers demand. The content owners, or I should say the accumulators and distributors, have told us that they will not make this content available until such time that we have these features available on our platform. We don't have much of a choice, we have to solve this problem one way or another." While I understand that the future for digitally released content certainly in the home environment-as more and more devices become intelligent, more and more things will be PCs-is of importance to future business models, it still didn't quite explain to me why some of the largest companies in the business here not only were in the process of implementing new hardware based digital restrictive management technology, but actually at this point in time really had conspired to keep the public and the customers in the darkest of the true purpose which was DRM. I'd like to address some this today because after a few years, I and some of the others in the industry believe we finally figured out why. First, however, I need to somewhat definitely define what the word trust means when used in the context of trusted computing. It does not exclusively mean that you as the owner can trust the processes running on your machine. It also, and perhaps for the purposes of our discussion today, more importantly means that third parties can trust that your computer will disobey your wishes. Third parties by means of trusted computing will know that your computer will implement whichever digital rights management system the producer of the content has placed on the content. The analog to this in the analog world as opposed to the digital world will be that a book vendor will know that you can read a book only once and then only with a special light that will also happily sell you. However, that is certainly the classic DRM application. There is another side to this. Providers of trusted computing products, especially if they're in a dominant market position, can trust that potential competitors will be prevented from competing in the future ever. Some of the obvious business objectives of trusted computing and the DRM it implements are of course the usual-prevent CD ripping and DiVX creation. Something that hasn't been talked about much is the plugging of the analog hole. What's the analog hole? Well, today's computers are high quality, the sound cards are high quality. Even with the best digital rights management system, you can still feed the speaker output right back into the sound card and digitize, which will give you a darn good copy, one that will certainly sound fine on the computer speakers on which most people probably listen to their MP3s. Having listened to MP3s, I don't understand why anybody would; the sound quality just doesn't meet my requirements, but then, I have a thousand CDs. Another issue is enabling flow control, information flow control, which I won't get into today. It allows the application provider to prevent the use of unlicensed software. Now this is something of more interest to application providers, if you're an application provider. It thereby is, as I mentioned earlier, as this gentleman from this operating system and office productivity company told me, it will allow the PC to become the core for home entertainment center, growing a new market. The PC industry fully understands that at the core of your future home entertainment system there will be some device processing data, and that device can either be manufactured in a Playstation-like fashion by Sony or it come from the usual vendors in the PC industry. The PC industry does not want to lose this market to Sony. They need to compete and this is fairly understandable. And lastly, it creates new market opportunities in the governmental sectors. Government employees are notorious for leaving laptops with top secret data on buses and in train stations. This is repeatedly being reported in the press. Having hardware security that prevents third parties from getting at this data obviously is a good thing and a clear and very legitimate market for it. So, let's look at some of the upcoming hardware/software DRM features in office productivity software, and here I would like to quote Bill Gates with Microsoft, "We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that email and documents were far more interesting domains." Why is that? Rather than hoping for a potential market expansion in the home entertainment system market, there certainly is a current clear market for office productivity software-word documents, e-mail documents, what have you. And there is at least some demand, and certainly some vendors believe there is a massive demand, for this technology, and to have technology that restricts what you can do with certain documents. For example, you can't forward this word document outside the company or I should say you can perhaps forward it, but nobody else at the company will be able to open it. Or you have some e-mail that only can be displayed on your screen and by the way, we're disabling screen copy so you can't just dump it to a graphics file. Or a document as was also stated would only be valid for so long and then will no longer be readable regardless of what PC you copy it to because you have a secure clock, there's no such thing as setting back the date. If you are the CEO of Enron, you would just absolutely love this technology, because there would be no evidence left for discovery. If you're a manager, and I once had a manager many years ago that made it a point never send any controversial instructions that would come back to bite him in e-mail, but always called me, and that was the only time he called me; now with this technology, he would be able to send these controversial instructions in email because I would never be able to use it against him. So yes, there's clear benefits. It's not clear that these are clear benefits to society. Let's have a quick quiz. We have a lot of lawyers here in the audience, so how does the law help trusted computing and the DRM it enables to stifle competition? Application vendors intend to wrap the content with files such as office productivity software documents with digital rights management features. Question: what does the federal prosecutor call a third party application that is compatible with the proprietary DRM format? Any lawyers in this audience? Come on, somebody � An illegal circumvention device. If you build compatible software that can read a DRM wrapped file format, you, at least as long as the software is open, thereby enable third parties to infringe on this such digitally right managed content. One hypothesis, an certainly my hypothesis and I believe it is the vendor hypothesis, is that this will make it illegal to create interoperable software in the United States, interoperable with software that has DRM features enabled � oh, I'm out of time; I apologize � subjecting software authors to substantial penalties. So what are the choice. Don't create interoperable software or spend five years in prison."

gdZiemann	Date: March 20, 2005 @ 11:47 PM "Whether to buy one or not won't be left to the consumer in the end." Are they going to force me to buy an IBM or a Dell? Will it be against the law not to have one? The choice always has and always will be in the hands of the consumer. You don't HAVE to buy anything.

awehr	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 12:34 AM actually READ what i posted. with this kind of system it will be ILLEGAL to make a software or platform which will interoperate with the DRM'ed files a trusted computing program creates. Additionally, microsoft wields immense market power, and can use it to make sure web servers, programs, and other devices will not interact with a trusted computing machine. Those who do not buy into the new totalitarian regime will be increasingly denied access to an increasing number of websites, devices, etc..

awehr	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 12:38 AM additionally, a new generation of media could be introduced, quietly slipped into a world with majority tcpa member devices which would refuse to interact with your system if you do not have a TPM, and the DMCA will also back that up. This is a serious threat, and one which cannot be averted by market forces due to the ignorance of the average computer buyer. These machines with TPM's will continue to permeate the market until saturation occrus, then all m$ has to do is pull the switch, and most people will bitch and moan, but they won't have the money or technical knowhow to do much about it.

Capt-n-Jack	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 4:36 AM "These machines with TPM's will continue to permeate the market until saturation occrus, then all m$ has to do is pull the switch, and most people will bitch and moan, but they won't have the money or technical knowhow to do much about it." I guess that's one way to detroy a company, piss-off your customers!

Capt-n-Jack	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 4:38 AM Hah, not only that, but it would seal the fate of microsoft in a millisecond! Linux users don't need Micro$oft!!

goldenpi	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 5:15 AM Part of the reason Microsoft supports this is because they can ensure it will not be linux-compatable, at least in a usable way. You can install linux on a TPM-enabled system, but the TPM will refuse to trust either the OS or the system as a whole. Thus you are effectively locked out of all systems which use the TPM to establish trust - business email, secure office documents, Trust-based VPNs and internet logon, protected media of all kinds, even shopping-sites that use the TPM to establish identity. Some pro-TC people point out constantly that they will allow full support for linux. This is a partial lie: linux can never be trusted in the way they state, because it has a recompileable kernel. A Trusted OS in the TC sense must be either code-signed or have support written into the TPM by the manufacturer - neither of which is possible if you have users compileing their own kernels. The linux support they refer to would be very limited, if implimented at all - perhaps access to the hardware crypto-accelerator, but little more. Of course, you can still run linux - not even Microsoft would dare propose a system that rejects non-trusted OS outright. At least, not yet.

nitedreamerxp	Date: March 21, 2005 @ 9:44 PM They are gonna drm themselves to the neck then people find out then the lawsuits begin once they figure they have been ripped off. So people you have a choice buy one and be a sucker or buy and off brand then get bold and run linux. My two cents.

Diogenes2	Date: March 22, 2005 @ 12:07 AM It won't affect me much. I have access to both a Mac and Linux, and whatever I miss out on I can live without. (Notwithstanding that something does need to be done about all this intrusion into consumers' rights, though.)

autodidact	Date: March 22, 2005 @ 5:57 AM Some countries are trying to move to Linux. Brazil for example. Trying to kick the Microsoft habit. I doubt China will be allowing all their government computers to be controlled by Redmond, for example. That would be a bitter pill the Central Committee, or whatever the leaders there are called, would not be willing to swallow. So, apart from resistance from the most tech-savvy people in this country, I see worldwide resistance. I do not see this as a fait accompli. Certainly our hackles should be raised and we should be very diligent about just what kind of CPUs we buy.

goldenpi	Date: March 22, 2005 @ 8:32 AM Good point there - some countries will be very opposed to this, China most of all. But the leaders in these countries are generially not very technical - it is likely they will not realise until too late. There are also economic issues: If 90% of equipment in the US uses one authentication system, any country that doesn't allow the manufacture of compatible equipment will lose a huge export market.